Hemingway Among the Modernists: Hemingway on His Own Terrain

This is Part 4 (of 5) of my essay, “Hemingway Among the Modernists,” which was originally a lecture I gave at the request of the Hemingway Foundation on July 21, 2012.

We have been talking about how Hemingway the young writer absorbed the writing techniques of Modernism in his Paris years, and made them his own in a profusion of short stories and novels written in the 1920s. Beyond technique, we have yet to speak about the themes that consumed this writer and resulted in a body of work separate and distinct from the other great Modernist writers. Like Joyce, Pound, Yeats and Eliot, Hemingway wrote long and prolifically in a terrain that came to be entirely of his own making. Each of these writers found a different answer to a question eternally addressed by art: What is the relationship of the self to the world of external reality? What is the relation of the world within to the world without?

The Romantic era answered this question by asserting the primacy of self. Its poets were engaged with the discovery and celebration of feeling. (It’s no coincidence that we find in their work so much of the lyric poem, which is the apt vehicle for such exploration, and so little of the narrative poem, which is occasioned by external events.) The Modernist poets continued this preoccupation with self, although theirs was more often about the failure of self than its celebration. “The Waste Land,” especially in the early version written by Eliot before it was remade by Pound, can be read as the portrait of a man having a nervous breakdown. Less darkly but to the same point, Frost addresses the tree outside his bedroom window.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

For poetry that is written to realize the self, the role of external reality is subordinate and one of service. Such a poem feels no responsibility to capture and convey the external in its full impact and import, but rather to use it as a spark plug for the exploration of self. The merest perceived detail — a buzzing fly or ticking clock — may suffice to spark the inner voyage.

Hemingway took an entirely different approach to external reality because the themes that he cared about required it. “I am trying to make, before I get through,” he wrote in 1933, “a picture of the whole world — or as much as I have seen of it.” He wrote out of a strong need to convey the true essence of the external world, “boiling it down always, instead of spreading it thin.” It was a fidelity, almost a fealty, to the authority of the external “exactly as it was.” His training as a journalist made him a meticulous observer and reporter of events. He had a photographic — or perhaps phonographic — memory for dialogue and conversation. His work as journalist carried him to the heart of wars and world events, but it wasn’t just his journalism. He always sought out fresh experience: bull fighting, deep sea fishing, big game hunting. (I personally admire this as I admire any poetry that seeks to colonize fresh experience; it expands the footprint of the art form.) Hemingway, who made himself an acknowledged expert on bull fighting in the writing of Death in the Afternoon, believed that when an author truly knows his subject, he can leave much unsaid in the story. This correlates to his “ice berg” theory, or Theory of Omission, which held that the meaning of a story lies deep below its narrative surface. One occasionally hears of poets who will board a ship or plane in search of fresh experience for their writing, but not often. I can think of a few poet friends. And Hart Crane in Mexico. Or the poet Craig Arnold, who tragically lost his life on a volcano while pursuing his passion for volcanology. But more typically contemporary poets will wait, like Wordsworth, for the daffodils to come to them. As Frost said, poets “stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.”

Pound and Yeats, like Hemingway, were exceptions to this Romantic/Modernist view of the poet as passive receptor. All three engaged the world at large with their art, although in very different ways. Pound, the supremely confident man who knew what to do and how to go about it in the poetry world, was completely unhinged when it came to the rest of the world. He tried to make poetry do everything, to make poetry the lever that would move the world. I think the entire Cantos can be read as an effort to use poetry to remake the world. But what came out, in addition to some of the most beautiful poetry of its time, was a compost of Fascist rant, anti-Semitic raving and crackpot economic theory. As the years went by and the big literary prizes eluded him in favor of his protégés, Pound’s behavior degenerated from the exuberant to the outrageous to the self-injurious. His wartime radio addresses in support of Mussolini landed him in an Allied prison camp at the end of WWII. In lieu of a treason trial he was committed to the prison ward of St. Elizabeth’s hospital for the insane. Twelve years later, through the intercession of major American writers including Hemingway, he was released and for the rest of his long life barely spoke or wrote again. Who can know what was in his mind, but to me Pound’s vow of silence was the equivalent of Oedipus putting out his eyes when he saw what he had done. Perhaps the tragedy of Ezra Pound was that he asked too much of poetry.

Contrast this with the career of William Butler Yeats, “a sixty-year-old smiling public man.” Pound and Yeats were not contemporaneous in age but they overlapped (the younger Pound served for a time as personal secretary to Yeats). The events of Irish independence, culminating in Easter, 1916, swept up both Yeats the poet and Yeats the patriot. But Yeats, unlike Pound, was keenly aware of the demarcation between the worlds of external and internal realities. He was always clear about how poetry sat with the larger world, as in these lines from “Adam’s Curse.”

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.

The poems of Yeats frequently record the public man suddenly aware of the poet anguishing within.

Both Pound and Yeats were political activists who sought to influence external events — respectively the rise of Fascism and the rise of Irish nationalism — but with opposite personal consequences. A cynic might say that Pound’s mistake was in choosing the wrong (i.e., losing) side. But the Irish rebellion of Easter 1916 failed as well. I would rather ascribe the success of Yeats and the failure of Pound to their differing views on the relationship of their art to external reality. Pound saw the world at large as an extension of the one he knew, the world of poetry, and spoke to it accordingly. Yeats saw the world of poetry and the world at large as separate, and dealt with each on its own terms. He wrote great poetry about the events of his time; he used his stature as a leading poet to get involved; he then worked, not as poet but as an elected member of the Irish Senate, to influence those events. On being asked to contribute a war poem, Yeats responded with “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

I think it better in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

Hemingway often spoke, in his private letters and public pronouncements, of writing what was “true.” By this I think he meant several things. It meant capturing the essence of events in a few words, something he mastered as a trained journalist. As a reporter he was proud of his ability to capture a hurricane in a sentence. But as fiction writer he was also perfectly willing to alter events in the service of the story — so by “true” I don’t think he simply meant dogmatically accurate reporting. As an artist he was after something else. In Hemingway’s fiction external events always intervene as a surprise to the characters; reality never does what they expect, and it’s usually worse than they expect. (I can think of no happy endings in Hemingway.) Here is the “turn” in “Indian Camp,” a short story in which Nick’s father, a doctor, successfully delivers an Indian baby in a primitive fishing camp.

He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.
“That’s one for the medical journal, George,” he said. “Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.”
Uncle George was standing against the wall, looking at his arm.
“Oh, you’re a great man, all right,” he said.
“Ought to have a look at the proud father. They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs,” the doctor said. “I must say he took it all pretty quietly.”
He pulled back the blanket from the Indian’s head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets.

The story ends with a short conversation in which the youngster Nick, who has witnessed all this, asks his father why people commit suicide; the two then return to civilization.

They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

This, I think, is what Hemingway the artist meant by “truth”: the action of event on character to reveal unexpected insights into human nature. Dorothy Parker, of New Yorker fame, once asked Hemingway what he meant by “guts.” His memorable answer: “grace under pressure.” The phrase has entered the language. For us today it captures, in a phrase, the heart of Hemingway’s moral code. “Grace under pressure.” The word “grace” describes a very special state of being. It’s what he admired in the toreador accepting the bull’s charge, the old fisherman defending his marlin in a battle he knew the sharks eventually would win. But this grace cannot occur without the “pressure” brought on by external situations and events. To be effective, the pressure must be extreme: the overpowering violence of mortal combat, blood sports — or a suicide in an Indian camp. This explains Hemingway’s concern as writer for getting external reality exactly right. It has to be authentic, and for that he brought a reporter’s eye for detail and an expert knowledge of his subject. It also had to be sudden and savage. In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” the protagonist starts his African safari with the bravado of the untested; his courage fails when he flees the charge of a wounded lion; he subsequently redeems himself and discovers true courage; the grace and independence that come out of that release him from an unhappy and dependent relationship with his wife. So far, so good — but Hemingway the artist is about to strike. In the final scene, as Macomber coolly stands his ground and fires on a charging Cape Buffalo, he is shot and killed by his wife, who would rather have him dead than have him leave her.

Share via
Copy link